Bitcoin is in the news again. Reasons for the price to go so high in the last weeks is not really clear to me. Maybe stocks markets have gone so high in the recent times, dragged by the election of Donald Trump, that now that Trump is really about to take over the office, worries all around the world start to appear and investors try to move their money into something that cannot be affected by any economical politics that will be taken around the world. But this is only my opinion.

In the light of such an increase of attention in Bitcoin, it’s the right time for other “competitors” to show what they are capable of. And it’s a great news that the first pictures of the first Ardor test client are shown (https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/(ardor)-it’s-coming/). Would be great to have soon a first rough version of the Ardor test client so that people can start playing with it. It would come at the right time and it will show people that this is the future of Cryptocurrencies. Besides the amazing capability of NXT as a financial platform, which will continue to be available in the first Ardor childchain called “Ignis”, it will allow additional childchains to be added to Ardor and these will not have to worry about having enough nodes to secure the network as this security is given by the Ardor main blockchain. Ardor also solves the blockchain bloating problem which is a common problem of all blockchain solutions.

All this besides the reasons that made me interested in NXT in the first place and that sometimes we forget. Ardor keeps those features:

– no mining with dedicated hardware which waste an incredible amount of energy, forging can be done on a raspberry PI as it’s based on PoS (Proof-Of-Stake)

– decentralisation: bitcoin was born with the idea to be decentralised as every user would have had a PC running the client and mining on its own. Now this is the situation: https://blockchain.info/pools . Not so decentralised anymore because of the mining pools.

– speed: blocks are generated every minute, in average, in NXT / Ardor. In Bitcoin block average generation time is 10 minutes.

– look and usability: may not be a crucial feature, but NXT’s official client has a wonderful web based user interface. If I would let my non-technical friends use it they would not have a problem.